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Pluto
Pluto is a dwarf planet in the Kuiper belt, a ring of bodies beyond Neptune. It was the first Kuiper belt object to be discovered. Pluto (previously Pluto Hochsicherheitsgefängnis) originally began as a German controlled colony and later a prison planet exclusively for life sentence prisoners from the entire Germanic Empire, and after the Heinrich riot came under control of the former prisoners and became independent from the rest of the Sol System. Currently Pluto a heavily feudalistic society composed of several states known as The Great Houses, the societies run on a strict hierarchy of lords, retainers, slaves, and peasants. The Great Houses of Pluto *Great House Cthulhu Macula *Great House Hayabusa Terra *Great House Venera Terra *Great House Tartarus Dorsa *Great House Lowell *Great House Pioneer (former) Retainers and Equipment Plutonians lack the more conventional militaries of other governments, instead each Great House employs a vast number of individuals known as retainers. Being a retainer places an individual above almost everyone else on the planet in terms of social status with the exceptions being Leviathan Priests and of Course Lords, however a strict chain of command exists within the retainer orders, with the general rule being individuals with the most experience (often meaning the most men slain) hold higher position over others. Depending upon the Great House, retainership may be something one is born into or must earn, and in House Cthulhu the mere act of murdering a retainer in battle can earn a man a place in the House. Due to the retainers position in Plutonian society as essentially nobility, each individual soldier is very well funded, just about every man serving a Great House owns a suit of custom made power armour that sports similar specifications to Mark IV GGR suits and owns a small arsenal of likewise customized firearms. However, it is estimated that between every Great House Pluto only houses a few hundred thousand retainers, an extremely small number by the standards of most major and even minor powers in the universe, making this a bit less impressive when you consider the total number of all retainers doesn't even match the total number of elite GGR soldiers sporting power armour. Pluto is a barren planet and lacks most major resource, therefore despite the knowledge and technology for arms manufacturing to exist on the planet a severe lack of metals means virtually no mass production exists. As such, most Plutonian equipment such as firearms, armour, ships, and all other manner of armament are obtained through trade deals with unaligned colonials (or illegally through GGR/UAF smugglers). Minor contracts for metals exist to supplement these trade deals however most of those go towards other necessities such as infrastructure, though Pluto is a notable trader in gold among the universe, mostly due to the heavy cosmetic motifications retainers make to their arms and armour. Most Plutonian retainers will use GGR weaponry and ships that have been heavily modified to suit the aesthetic style of their Great House, though the nature of their armament acquisition means that it is not uncommon to see UAF or even commercial equipment in use around the planet. Some accounts even claim that Plutonians have gone into battle armed with melee weapons such as swords and halberds, only carrying handguns, though whether this is a standard thing or just the eccentricities of a handful of over zealous retainers, if true at all, is unknown. Leviathan Worship The primary religion of all the Plutonian Great Houses is the worship of Gods of The Black Cosmos, primarily of the supposed "gods of the gods," the Leviathans. It is believed by Plutonians that within the darkest reaches of the universe light devouring god-beings known as Devils or Great Ones (depending on the House) slowly work their way across the universe devouring and destroying light. It is believed that one day the Gods, spearheaded by the great Leviathans, shall reach the Sol System and bring unimaginable horror and death to all who live with light upon their faces and within their hearts, but that the worshipers of the Gods shall be spared as they already live on the darkness of Pluto and have snuffed out all the light inside themselves, leaving them as the sole survivors of mankind. An interesting fact about Leviathan worship is there seems to be a great deal of infighting among the various Great Houses regarding many elements of the religion. Some believe that "devouring and destroying light" is a metaphorical interpretation of the will of the Gods and that it means that when they arrive they shall seek out all people with a shred of moral decency and bring about an absolute hell; while other Houses believe in a literal interpretation that the Gods shall actually eat any light and all who rely on it, going so far as to impose strict laws on the amount of lumens any light source can give off. Even the proper titles of the Gods causes infighting, House Cthulhu for example insists upon calling them Devils, while Hayabusa takes a slightly less grim approach and refers to them as Great Ones. Despite some instances of Leviathan Priests/Priestesses being seen outside of Pluto, it does not seem to be a particularly widespread religion, with at the very most only a tiny handful of small cults existing in colonial space if even that. The Slaves of Pluto A fundamental aspect of Plutonian society is the breeding and keeping of slaves. After the Germans were driven from Pluto it was discovered that the planet was being used to test experimental human genetic engineering technology on the prisoners by the Plutonians. It didn't take long for the Plutonians to learn to use the technology and began to use it on the remaining German personnel and civilians on the planet and slowly breed them into misshapen abominations the Plutonians came to refer to as "beasts." Slaves, or beasts, are purpose breed to fulfill many specific tasks that Plutonian may lack the resource or technology to do, or simply as vanity items for higher ranking members of the Great Houses. Some categories of beasts include but are not limited to: * Companion Beasts : The most premium of vanity type beasts, companion beasts command the highest price of all Plutonian slaves and are generally reserved for high ranking retainers and in rare occasions wealthy off worlders. Unlike most other slaves, companion beasts do not really conform to any standardized form, they could be modeled after real individuals or be completely inhuman depending on the contract given by the client. Companion beasts fill many roles, some being used for sexual slavery with others even being used as companions in battle, though some may appear no different than a Plutonian retainer themselves in appearance they are still slaves, and thus enjoy no rights unless "freed" by their masters. *Food Beasts : 30Ibs headless fetuses that die mere minutes after being disconnected from their umbilical cords unless put on life support, they are the primary means of nutrition on Pluto as crops of any sort are extremely difficult to grow in any appreciable amount on the barren planet. Food beasts, though the most prolific and inexpensive of the slaves, are still higher than peasants in hierarchy and thus peasants are required to pay their ruling House a tribute for all food beast meat owned *Birthing Beasts : The main providers of the slaves, massive, bloated creatures resembling nothing more than a several ton blob of fat with grotesquely engorged breasts and genitalia nearly the size of a grown man. Though technically dozens of unique types of birthing beasts exist for every variation of slave Plutonians still considered them as one creature. *Mansteeds : A vanity beast of Great House Lords and Retainers, they resemble 8 foot tall armless men with vaguely horse like heads. They can often be found straining under the weight of their riders in power armour. *Transport Beasts : Massive, only vaguely humanoid beasts standing anywhere from 20-30 feet in height after reaching maturity, they stand hunched over, with arms atrophied twigs and their eyeless heads scarcely larger than a humans. They are used primarily for the transportation of heavy equipment or supplies, but are occasionally used during wars as armoured personnel carriers. Practically vegetative, require a rider using a series of electrical prods embedded in their vertebrae to move. The Heinrich Riot Taken from the account of a retainer of Great House Cthulha Macula. : I'm sure the story of Pluto's inception is well known even to the sun cursed, but the brief history is that it was once a prison planet of the Germans, Pluto Hochsicherheitsgefängnis, the Germans felt it'd be more productive to simply house the worst criminals within their empire on an entirely separate world as to not tarnish their own military and civilian colonies with them. They only had one of course, and an empire of enormous size. Millions of prisoners of all kinds deemed by the Germans as simply being far too dangerous to "reeducate." As I'm sure you also know, this planet was later discovered to be the source of a massive project with technologies that could rewrite the DNA and chromosomes of individuals (not the simple transmogs of your societies, mere fashion that is, the Germans wanted to turn men into monsters). The Germans however had too little strength and too many men to control, a communication issue with courts and police of other planets leading to far too many prisoner shipments others will say, sheer arrogance of men believing their armour cannot be torn of by a hundred prying hands I say! I cannot say much of the other Houses, but within the highest security sector, what would eventually become House Cthulhu (a name taken from the location of our ancestors sector of course), the prisoners outnumbered the guards by obscene amounts and the failing grasp of the Germans was obvious to all. : In person patrols lessened out of fear, and when they did happen it would be with far more guards than the norm. Watch over the prisoners came from afar, they were ready to begin firing at a moments notice, but dared not come from their walls. Talking became very simple, and oh did men talk, for when so many men, murders the lot of them, gather together many interesting facts are shared; where the armour is weakest, how to easily disable a mans arms from firing. Patrols came and went, and on one faithful day a small group led by the Great Heinrich Shindler lunged upon the guards wielding little more than nails with makeshift handles and sharpened tooth brushes. Many died of course, the scream of the guns tore apart dozens, maybe hundreds, but they could not hold back thousands of men crawling over each other to be the man who earned the glory of murdering the guards. The guns stopped barking and the guards lay dead or dying, and those that had slaughtered them took the guns of those fools. This event became known as the Heinrich riot. : What followed immediately after was a complete takeover of the cell block, this was known as The War of Bars. The Germans believed if they sent in many heavily armed guards at choke points the prisoners couldn't simply rush them without being quickly dispatched, but when they attempted this it led to a long stalemate as the prisoners made no attempt to move in, for they had created their own gun nests with the weapons they had taken. : It pains me to admit that what is now House Hayabusa did anything of worth, but that stalemate may have gone on until reinforcements came to take back control of Cthulhu's cell block; but not soon after our own riots the Germans began receiving transmissions that their cell blocks to the east were also experiencing riots, as did the cell block that became House Pioneer and House Venera. Panic erupted among the Germans, if they had played it smart and simply waited they may have crushed us then, but they believed they needed control of the cell block immediately to restore order. They ran in, put up a good fight, but were ultimately torn apart by their own guns. A complete lock down seemed the only option now, close every door and leave us all to starve to death no matter how long that took. As I understand it was a last resort as it ultimately meant the prison as it currently was could basically no longer exist, it was the same as losing the entire cell block. : The lockdown was a hard time as I understand it, but the houses had ways of surviving, the simplest being well organized cannibalism, the weakest were periodically murdered to feed others; a single man could feed a dozen men for weeks if stretched out long enough, and so what should have been only a month before the prison was won again turned into years. German high command was not pleased in the slightest by having their primary prison and most promising source of genetic engineering research essentially standing as a waste of money, and so a massive wave of reinforcements arrived to fix the problem. : When the prison gates opened once again the men were hardened and ready, and to the Germans surprise they were indeed changed. The first wave that came in was an off world team, they thought this whole situation was incompetence of a massive degree from the guards and thought the danger was fantasized. Their arrogance led to the the first great slaughter of the war, Cthulhu's guns spoke well when they entered and began cutting them down one by one, I've heard the fight the delivered was far better than the one of the guards, but even with a nearly 10:1 casualty rate all of them lay dead in those prison cells. We found more guns than we knew what to do with on their corpses, grenades too. The second wave approached more cautiously but now it was our turn to take the fight to them, Those decided to be weakest and destined one day to be food were forced through the gates first armed with not but crude spears and knives, and as the Germans aimed high to cut them down those with the guns lay low and simply began firing up through the foodbeasts. The Germans simply couldn't comprehend that we were simply shooting through our own men and eventually began a retreat when the prisoners simply failed to stop coming. As I understand similar battles were happening in the other cell blocks. : When the Germans retreated we followed, sending foodbeasts in the front and staying low ourselves. We had finally escaped the cell blocks and were free to fight toe to toe with them. At this point the panic from German forces was at its most severe, and the idea of using airstrikes upon their own infrastructure seemed less ridiculous. They never had time to make the call though, our own soldiers, guarded behind walls of manbeasts and knowing the prisons better than the off world soldiers, pursued so swiftly all possibility of high explosives was simply off the table due to the possibility of killing themselves. We pushed them further and further from the prison, losing few soldiers and many foodbeasts as we did so, not allowing them to retreat far enough to call in their orbital guns. They had a single option now, retreat to Tobbaugh Regio, a city region meant to house the prisons many guards and their families, and begin a complete evacuation of the planet. The order was called and the soldiers began to mount every single vehicle they could in such a disorganized panic that hundreds were left behind, and many more struggled for too long to enter the transport vehicles that before they could board them to capacity they found themselves being torn out and slaughtered by the foodbeasts. The vehicles were used by our soldiers, thousands of manbeasts crammed into every single one, and they gave pursuit after the guards and into the heart of Tombaugh. : The evacuation was, needless to say, a massive failure. They did not expect the prisoners not just from Cthulhu, but Hayabusa and Venera and Pioneer to close in on them so swiftly. They were meant to disable all the anti-spacecraft weaponry (put there for any UAF forces), the men guarding those posts left in such a panic they didn't; they were meant to evacuate every soldier, guard, and citizen of that planet, but by the time our soldiers were upon them only a few ten thousands were boarded on the escape shuttles and simply locked the doors and flew off, leaving millions of guards and civilians. This was when the planet was truly ours. '' : ''I know not of the what happened next much, such is a lost dark age to us due to a mass panic over questions of food. Only the barest basics survive, the most simple I can explain is that the true intent of the planet, the genetic altering technology, was discovered as well as many informational logs on how to operate it and tests done in the past. We took all the civilians as our prisoners, and decide they would be the new foodbeasts. The genetic altering devices helped in this matter immensely, infants biology could be changed so they would come out as little more than rapid growing mounds of meet in weeks instead of nine months, we used the women of the prisoners to breed more suitable foodbeasts, as well as many other such creatures to satisfy our other needs. Few were spared from this fate, many became wives or scholars of the Houses, many more turned into the slaves I'm sure you know of today. Everything that once was possible only through supply deliveries from off world was achieved through breeding and mutating slaves to serve specific needs. : As for the formation of the Great Houses, the war had simply shown us that not all men deserved to stand as equals, some simply had far more worth than others. Heinrich became as a king and the soldiers as lords, while the foodbeasts became little more than peasants. Of course the other cell blocks believed they had more influence over the war, and that their leaders should stand as kings. We were in a weakened state and needed to focus all possible resource on turning prisons to castles and pipes to swords, so a fragile truce was decided upon by the proclaimed "kings," we agreed they would be lords over their own regions for the time, and they we would be left to our own affairs to grow strong enough to face any possibility of attempted the Germans returning. The truce lasted forty years before House Hayabusa attacked House Pioneer. The reason you ask? Why it's simple. : House Pioneer was researching the concept behind an artificial sun, and we all looked up to see Devils consuming all the light they came across and leaving nothing but blackness in their wake, and worse still, lurking among them as kings of all Devils, we saw Leviathans.